Linux Top 3: Debian's New Leader, Linux 3.9 and Xen

April 15, 2013

By
Sean Michael Kerner

1) Debian Project Leader

For the first time in three years, Debian has a new leader this week. Lucas Nussbaum was voted by Debian developers to be the new DPL this week. Nussbaum succeeds Stefano Zacchiroli, who decided not to run for re-election this time.

In his DPL platform Nussbaum notes that he has been involved with the project since 2005. Among his contributions is an effort to help improve collaboration with Ubuntu

"I worked on improving ways to manage divergence between Debian and Ubuntu, and to get Ubuntu improvements back into Debian," Nussbaum stated.

When asked what Debian should be in five years, Nussbaum stressed the importance for reinforcing Debian's position in the FOSS movement.

"It should be the main active intermediary between upstream projects and final users," Nussbaum added. "Of course, providing a good basis for derivatives is important, because derivatives users are Debian users, even if some of them do not acknowledge that. But we should also aim at reinforcing the visibility and the impact of Debian itself, because the extremely important values we fight for as a project are often neglected by our derivatives."

Nussabaum's term officially starts on April 17th.

2) Linux 3.9 nears

There is no hard and fast rule on how many release candidates are required before a Linux kernel goes generally available. Now at release candidate number 7, the Linux 3.9 kernel however is getting close.

"This is mostly random one-liners, with a few slightly larger driver fixes," Linus Torvalds wrote in a mailing list message. "The most interesting (to me, probably to nobody else) fix is a fix for a rather subtle TLB invalidate bug that only hits 32-bit PAE due to the weird way that works."

3) Xen Moves to the Linux Foundation

The Xen open source hypervisor which had been run as a project by Citrix is now finding a new home at the Linux Foundation.

"The Linux Foundation will provide the necessary forum and guidance for the Xen Project to be adapted by the diverse group of contributors who are taking advantage of the project's many benefits," said Peder Ulander, VP, Open Source Solutions, Citrix in a statement. "We’re committed to the Xen Project and look forward to continuing our active participation and collaborating with companies across industries to advance Xen Project for multiple applications."

The new collaborative effort will benefit from the support of Amazon Web Services, AMD, Bromium, Calxeda, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung and Verizon.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.